16 Nov2018

Where has Technitribe been for the last 2 years? The short answer: in domain limbo.

Christmas Islands

.cx is a Christmas Islands top-level domain (TLD). I did not have the domain set to auto-renew because I was trying to get away from my old registrar. At the time it was expiring I didn’t have the cash on hand to renew it. I will admit, I did not read all the Term & Conditions for the .cx TLD before registering. I guess I really screwed the pooch there.

It turns out that if you have a .cxdomain, and it expires, then you have a problem. They will effectively hold it hostage for a period of 4 months. During this time you have the “option” to restore the domain, but at the cost of $400.00 USD. Like I said, I was not very cash flush at the time.

Waiting Period

Shortly after the domain expired I moved across the country. While getting set up in my new location the domain left the restoration period and was open to general registration again. As is typical, a reseller had squatted the lnx.cx domain and bought it as soon as it became available. I resigned myself to my fate, I would have to let it go for a while.

Return of lnx.cx

The blog is now back! A few weeks ago I finally had the cash necessary to register it from a new registrar who isn’t evil (Netim). We have a new SSL Certificate issued by Let’s Encrypt, no more untrusted RapidSSL security alerts in your browser. And, as an aside, the setup for installing this new certificate was incredibly easy. I am genuinely surprised at how smooth it was using the certbot tool.

What’s Next?

I need to start writing more blog posts! I might shift the focus of the blog from being so Tech focused and open it up to capture some of my other interests, too. Such as woodworking. I really enjoy making and restoring furniture. I should write some blog posts about that.

Virtual Disk Guide

Interested in virtualization? Do QCOWs rule your filesystem? Are you a libvirt or KVM+QEMU wizard? I wrote a book about virtual disk management. Check out the The Linux Sysadmin's Guide to Virtual Disks online for free at ScribesGuides.com.

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bitmath

bitmath is a Python library for dealing with file size units (GiB's, kB's, etc) in a sane way. bitmath supports arithmetic, rich comparison, conversion, automatic best human-readable representation, and many otherutility functions. Read some examples on the docs site or check out the source on GitHub.